[Issue #37] We Can Fake It 'Til We Make It
An exploration of empathy and ways to rebuild it
“We need to dispel the myth that empathy is ‘walking in someone else’s shoes.’ Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.”
-Dr. Brene Brown, “Atlas of the Heart”
Adulting is hard.
It’s not that I don’t want to hear her. It’s that I, in those moments, feel such conviction about the story in my head that I dig my heels in and claim no one listens. But that conviction and the tone it carries sends a message of anger, hostility, and resentment. Not to mention the insinuation of particular language in the heat of an angry outburst (or what my therapist calls a tantrum).
Empathy feels like one of those things that should be inherently understood, like the names of colors and what numbers mean. But it’s not. And assuming that we know something is half of our troubles.
If we can acknowledge that we likely don’t know all there is to know about something, we have a much better shot of seeing the holes in our knowledge, allowing us the room to grow beyond the previous limits we placed on ourselves.
The lack of empathy inside me when my anger takes over could sink a ship. Let’s stop sinking shit and learn to tolerate all of these pesky emotions, shall we?
No Sympathies, Please
To start, let’s just define empathy and sympathy.
Empathy is our friend and it helps keep us close with those we love. The UC Berkley Greater Good Science Center says this:
”Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.”
And the Cambridge Dictionary defines sympathy as:
“(an expression of) understanding and care for someone else's suffering.”
Which is to say that sympathy is taking pity on someone and/or feeling relieved it’s not you with the bad luck. Ouch.
Don’t worry. We’re all human and we’ve all been assholes, and felt like assholes. It’s in our nature.
Assholery and Compassion
Assholery isn’t a word, but it fits for what we’re trying to understand here. We all know what it feels like to sit in shame or guilt when we emotionally wound someone we love. And we all know what it’s like to get out of that rut and back into the shine that streams through our days, reminding us we’re only human.
So, if we’re feeling as though we’re always1 an asshole, how do we make space for feeling less like an asshole and more like the Self that hides beneath the shit we’ve buried ourselves under? It’s painful to feel bad. If it wasn’t, feelings would be called funzies instead. And we wouldn’t grow and expand into the full, beautiful, flawed person that we are.
We’ve talked a bit about self-compassion and understanding compassion as a whole concept that’s huddled beneath the LOVE umbrella. Self-compassion is giving yourself a pass when you fail.
Self-compassion is reminding yourself that you are your own best friend, that you’ve got your own back, and that you’re supported by other humans who genuinely love you.
Self-compassion is not shaming yourself, not spiraling down.
Self-compassion is being curious about your reactions, decisions, behaviors, thoughts - not judgmental and angry.
Self-compassion is self-forgiveness.
And both self-compassion and compassion for others are key when we’re talking about empathy.
The problem with compassion, though, is that we often forget to be gentle and kind to the most important and special person in our lives - ourselves. And I’ve become a devout believer that we treat others within our sphere the same way we treat ourselves silently. All those narratives that play and play on repeat in our heads take over the bus and before we can even enjoy the ride, the journey’s turned into a whole Speed situation.
Compassion allows us to bridge the gap of differing perspectives, often about hot-button or triggering elements within our relationships. And when we can kindly, maturely, responsibly make space and hold someone else’s viewpoint without strapping our ego in for a battle of right vs wrong, me vs you, emotions or experiences, we’re in a much better position to have the successful outcome we’re after in a moment of emotional amplification.
In the paper “Imagination, Empathy, and Moral Deliberation: The Case of Imaginative Resistance” by Karsten R. Stueber in the South Journal of Philosophy, Special Edition on Empathy and Ethics, accurately reflects the absurd nature of our collective discomfort with our emotions and the emotions and experiences of others (I’ve trimmed it down some for the sake of our topic):
“We do not seem to have any difficulties in accepting and imaginatively engaging with worlds where the cow flies over the moon or bears are sitting on three chairs, where Lord Voldemort has seven horcruxes and people have all sorts of other magical powers, or where people wake up one morning and are metamorphosed into cockroaches. Moreover, not only do we seem to have no difficulty in imaginatively engaging with such worlds, we also find it rather entertaining to do so…
While we do not seem to have difficulties in accepting worlds that differ dramatically in their natural constitution, we do seem to have a hard time letting ourselves get drawn into those worlds that explicitly differ in their moral structure and their moral standards. To use a typical example from the philosophical literature, in reading the sentence, “In killing her girl, Giselda did the right thing, after all it was a girl” (Walton 1994), our imaginative engagement with the text seems to stop cold turkey.”
What Stueber points out is imperative for our full understanding of the scope of empathy. We need to acknowledge that we aren’t always able to meet a moment with compassion and empathy; we’re definitely gonna fuck it up. But that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying to understand, trying to gain a better hold on our own interior mess, trying to be more kind and open.
I’ve learned that life and marriage is literally all about trying again, and again.
Melding Compassion and Empathy
To help blend together these two kind-of wonky and opposite abstract concepts, let’s move toward understanding how empathy is typically learned (in childhood) and how that affects our own understanding of and capacity for empathy.
To do this, I’ve dug up some interesting research. This piece is arguing for the expansion of empathy education in public schools. Lucky for us, this piece does a fantastic job of illustrating not only the importance of learning empathy, but it also explores a curious way of building empathy. This paper was originally published in the Philosophical Inquiry and Education in 2016 by Natalie Fletcher through Concordia University:
“…So where does this leave children and the tall order of educating for empathy? The cultivation of practical wisdom seems vital to empathic education since it can sensitize children to the salient particulars of situations that call for an empathetic response..
…“In the moral sphere,” writes Hursthouse, “we do assume there is a distinction between being mentally a child and mentally an adult”—namely, the capacity to act from reason (Hursthouse, 1990, 15). When it comes to empathy, children may not perceive all the relevant considerations in a situation and thus misconstrue it, resulting in a narrow empathetic scope that excludes certain people or distorts their experience. Further, this tendency may follow them into adulthood”
So, what we can gain from this is the awareness and understanding of just how large an impact our parental figures had on our threshold for empathy, long before we even knew what empathy was. As children, we learn everything about our worlds and ourselves for the first several years specifically from our parents and the ways in which they engage (or don’t engage) with us. How emotionally present our parents were (for us and their partner) has a ripple effect far into our futures.
We learn by seeing, hearing, and doing. The dynamics of the intimate relationship our parents had (when we were young) influences our understanding of empathy and compassion. If we’re hugged when we fall down, pulled in close just before going to bed, exchanging laughter and playful energy as children (with present and engaged parents), our understanding of empathy and compassion will be quite different from a childhood experience fraught with yelling, food instability, emotional neglect (or overwhelm), or feeling unsafe (in any capacity) and unprotected. It’s easy to see it when it’s laid out like this, but in the moments of daily life, we often forget that we are simply a complex progression of our generational familial upbringings, whatever those were.
Imagining Empathy Internalizes Compassion
If we’re unsure about our capacity for empathy, we can take a few moments and reflect upon the type of person we want to be. Most of us would prefer to be perceived (or perceive ourselves) as kind, generous, warm, humorous, intelligent.
Building empathy sets up the alignment we’ll need to internalize compassion. How do we build something that’s a feeling and not a bridge?
We pretend!
Philosophy Now! published an essay by Rick Lewis that explores empathy through a philosophical lens. Lewis makes a stark, harsh, and true statement about collective empathy (that is, a shared empathy across a strata or large group of people) and how our lack of imagination during conflict causes deeply painful suffering:
“An alternative way to see the importance of empathy is to ask what happens when it fails. Many everyday failures of empathy are subtle, unimportant, even unnoticeable, but consider for example the 9/11 attacks on New York or (on a lesser scale) the recent London bombings. How could anyone be prepared to cause such intense pain to other human beings – the innocent victims and their families – except through a catastrophic failure of the imagination? It is as if the bombers are so selfishly wrapped up in their own grievances, ideals and sacrifice – their own drama – that they forget about the pain they will cause. This is surely also true of innumerable acts of war, terrorism and mass destruction down the ages, and military leaders often try to deaden their followers’ empathy towards the ‘foe’ precisely because it is an impediment to the efficient conduct of slaughter.”
As a combat veteran of the OEF and OIF wars, I can firsthand recount all the ways in which we were conditioned out of feeling empathy, compassion, or curiosity. And it makes sense, right? It’s hard to kill a man when you see him as a person.
Re-learning empathy has been difficult for me, not only from war, but childhood, too. It’s been a lot of therapy, self-education, and gross self-honesty to even crack open the defenses that kept my compassion and empathy away from my heart.
But, imaginative empathy isn’t the only way to increase our thresholds for empathy and compassion. Greater Good Magazine has an awesome section dedicated to compassion and empathy, and it’s worth checking out (it’s free) and I found the following paragraphs helpful for illustrating ways in which we can build empathy:
“While there’s lots of research supporting those kinds of compassion-cultivating practices, there’s also a place for informal, moment-to-moment practices throughout the day.
For example, you could notice when compassion comes easily or spontaneously for you throughout the day (e.g., watching the evening news). You could notice when you resist acknowledging or being with suffering (your own or others) throughout the day (e.g., when passing someone on the street who is asking for money or an extended family member who is challenging). Throughout the day, you could notice when you judge or minimize suffering (e.g., saying that it doesn’t count or is insignificant compared to someone else or something else going on in the world). We often notice suffering (our own and that of others) but quickly dismiss it and thus do not allow ourselves to be emotionally touched or moved by the suffering (the second component of compassion).”
Going Forth With Empathy
I believe that if we can un-learn all the shit we learned about empathy and compassion, we’ll be able to re-learn the internal beauty that lives inside each of us.
I believe that every human is born with the capacity to feel things, including compassion and empathy. It’s our responsibility to identify our own emotions and honor them, hone them, and give ourselves a chance to be present within this life we’ve worked so hard to build, with empathy in our hearts.
“Empathy is a superpower that would heal the world if we could only harness it.”
-Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents”